Distorted Perfection
by Meredith of Ladywinter
Summary: Lexi Jiang is a frail and sickly outcast who lives through creating unrealistically perfect characters. Can she succeed when she is forced to live like one of her flawless heroines? The future of Tortall and her own world hang in the balance.
1. Prologue

**_ Distorted Perfection_**

_Summary: The frail and sickly outcast, Lexi Jiang, lives in fear of being ostracized and taunted by her rigidly oppressive peers during the day, when she is forced to spend her time in a world of conformity. Lexi's favorite time is night, when dreams of a wise, green-eyed being bring her relief from the hours of mediocrity. Other than that, her only outlet is to write. But Lexi's writing, an expression of what she feels she can never have, is embroidered with unrealistically perfect heroines whom she has forced to "live for her"- in the "imaginary" realm of Tortall. When an unexpected accident, combined with divine intervention from the Great Mother Goddess, brings this pariah to the realm of her dreaming, she is offered a proposition: to balance the crown of perfection upon her own head and act as flawlessly as one of her characters. Little does she know it, a large stake lies on her success._

* * *

**Prologue**

She stood on a plain of grass, smooth as velvet, the serene emerald uninterrupted by trees, stones, or any further hints of life. The sky above seemed to curve to meet the horizon, so that pure blue and fluffy white rounded as if reflected in a single raindrop. Sunlight, pure and golden, rolled over her frail limbs and made them strong as jewel-bright leaves tinted with the colors of autumn rained from the sky, unexplained but beautiful. The girl laughed out loud, and the sound dissolved surreally into the distance, as if borne aloft on a pair of invisible, angelic wings. Throughout it all, the sky was pierced by emerald eyes, but the girl did not question their presence. They were wise eyes, beautiful eyes, eyes that saw and understood and guided. They were goddesses' eyes- wild, but kindly. She accepted them.

But suddenly, the sky turned black, the inky blackness of midnight, like a murder's hour. The clouds evaporated into swirls of gray fog and impurity, leaving her in utter. She sensed the grass beneath her shrivel and die, grasping desperately for light that would not reach it. The green eyes became cruel and icy, full of malice and silent, savage laughter. As the new strength in her limbs faltered and evanesced, the black sky _rang_.

And soon the dark dream-world of the ruined plain dissolved, breaking up into hues and gradients unseen before. rainbow ribbons appeared and rippled, shining beautifully but maliciously, like a sort of distorted perfection. But oddly enough, the ringing continued. The girl struggled against invisible bonds and shielded her ears from the awful noise… until a single ray of light floated through the blackness.

* * *

_Disclaimer: Any familiar characters, settings, etc. belong to Tamora Pierce. The plot, as well as any of the above that are unrecognizable, are mine._


	2. Chapter I

**_ Distorted Perfection_**

* * *

**Chapter I**

The ringing resonated from an alarm clock, floating in the dimness of her barely conscious mind. The girl writhed on her bed, scrawny limbs wild and ivory cheeks feverishly flushed, fighting her invisible demons.

"Lexi?" a voice, comfortingly familiar, broke through the nightmarish wanderings of her mind. "Alexandra Meiqing Jiang! _Gai qi chuang le!_ Wake up." That voice, speaking in her native Mandarin... Lexi stopped struggling against the force that still chained her and wrenched open her tightly shut eyes. Her mother's face, almond-shaped brown eyes impatient but concerned, met her gaze. No piercing emerald eyes or utter, chaotic darkness was visible. She was safe.

"Mama?" she murmured foolishly, realizing with a start that the chains she thought were strangling her had only been her sheets. "What time is it?"

"Time to wake up," the dark-haired woman sighed, shaking her head knowingly. "Hurry up and get dressed, or you'll be late for school. There's an algebra test today!"

Lexi untangled herself from the bedspread and rushed to obey, allow herself a sigh of her own. _So it was only a nightmare_, she thought with relief. Odd, for the dream had been so lifelike. _None of it was real._ But then, so were the goddess's eyes, that beautiful plain, and the peace she had felt, swallowing the darkness she was certain defined her soul. _None of it was real._

* * *

Lexi stared out of the tiny window in her language arts portable, black eyes squinting behind her silver-rimmed lenses at the football team practicing calisthenics in the yard. She drummed slim fingers against the smooth wood of her desk, waiting as her teacher, the slight-figured, mousy-haired Ms. Portright, handed out the evaluations for the narratives they had written. She squirmed in the burgundy plastic chair that too large for her frail body, feeling a mixture of anxiety and apprehension jolt through her slight frame. F_rowning, _ Lexi turned her body to glance around the classroom at her fellow students, who conversed nonchalantly or read silently. None of them were being plagued by the nerves that always bothered her before some sort of judgment was passed. She shouldn't be, either, not for a three-page long paper that counted on as an insignificant daily grade. It wasn't important, and too much worrying would only tax her, yet she continued her silent fretting_. Why does this mean so much for me, anyway?_

"Lexi Jiang," the teacher slipped a yellow rubric into the girl's unconsciously outstretched hand, bringing her back from the realms of rumination. Lexi frowned, smoothing the folds out of the paper before setting it back on her desk. Her bespectacled eyes scanned the loopy, black-ink script almost hungrily as she read to herself.

"Jiang, Alexandra: Fast-paced and original plot, language is descriptive and precise, if a bit flowery. Metaphors and analogies used effectively. Antagonist and supporting characters are well-developed, but heroine seems rather one-dimensional. Kindly, intelligent, valiant, and beautiful, exhibits definite lack of faults, unrealistic. It is advisable to further develop your protagonists, making them more believable and easier to relate to. Good attention to grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling. One typographical error."

The teachers spidery cursive continued across the black-bordered boxes, spelling out the usual, mundane linguistic drivel. Lexi, feeling tears of disappointment prickle behind her glasses, ridiculous for such an unimportant assignment, swiped at them impatiently with the back of her hand and scanned down to the bottom of the paper to find her overall score. It was a ninety-two.

Lexi crumpled the rubric up carelessly, in sharp contrast with the careful way she handled it before. She shoved into her language arts binder, biting her lip to prevent more prickles of discontent from burning her eyes. It was strange to think she would have been satisfied with such a grade in science or algebra- satisfied, and maybe even pleased. But it pained her ridiculously in writing, the one thing she felt she could do. _Ms. Portright doesn't get it,_ the girl thought bitterly, letting brown-black hair swing in front of her face to hide resentment-red cheeks. What if she needed perfection, the little she could get? What if this pseudo-creation, giving life to imaginary people to fulfill her own needs, was her life? _A can't change what I am_, she thought with a confidence that she didn't quite feel.

Briskly, she shook herself out of her reflections, realizing just in time that the teacher was scribbling a journal prompt across the white board. The pearly yellow writing (_why did teachers insist on using such a ridiculous color?_) caught the harsh glow of the overhead fluorescent lighting and shone in blinding loops of color _._ "Write a poem, rhyming or non-rhyming, in any form, to describe your essence," she managed to discern. _Essence? What the_... Lexi shook her head- this was so unlike the humdrum teacher she had known that it _must_ have come from one of the writing conventions Ms. Portright had attended last week. The thought made her smile to herself, but her amusement was replaced by worry when she remembered the many failed attempts she had made at poetry. _I'm not a poet!_ she thought desperately, _I'm a prose writer. Well, maybe not that, either,_ she amended, remember her evaluation and the ninety-two. But there was nothing to do but retrieve the composition notebook from under her desk and write

.Her mind moved sluggishly, refusing to function, as if she swam through a river of syrup, against the honeyed flow. What was essence? What was _her _essence? Her mind grasped desperately at whatever information she could distill. _Night. Night and dreaming,_ she decided at last_,._ There was no loneliness or weakness hidden in the starlight. And no callous teachers passing judgment on her. Briefly, Lexi remembered the disorienting dream from the night before, but she had already started writing, her script becoming spidery and crooked as her mind and hand raced against one another and against time.

"Shattered rainbows in dusk-blank souls   
Shards of light stab and silver moonbeams die   
Weathered by tactless gales, the heralds of dawn   
And sun rises, screaming silently, peeling back   
Gentle, dark- clouded curtains to unearth   
The constant chaos of reality, more unreal   
Than fantasy, as true dreams evanesce   
Swirling through jetsam of the daylight world   
Of silent specters that fear the dark   
And demons disguised as childish forms   
Striking, expunging the protecting blackness   
Hurtling me into the abyss of daylight   
Searing, glaring rainbows burned into my eyes   
An eternity to erase the suffering   
But an eternity is much too long for me.   
  
When moonset comes my silver dreams die   
Folded like crumpled bat wings, black light   
Monsters can't be seen behind dark gray veils   
And dreams become shields from facing the world   
When sunlight shows like piercing goddesses' eyes   
I run toward the dusky labyrinth, my refuge   
Of whispered words and fantasy, a silent poem   
Fables that shield me from unforgiving reality   
I hide from the specters with a pen as my sword   
But it shatters when they break through the wall   
Of woven dreams and pleas for darkness   
I'm left, exposed, protected by naught   
And I must offer a piece of my soul, a shard   
Of scintillating poetry, a silent plea and compromise   
Though I cannot betray the night.   
  
The specters snatch and feed upon me, criticizing,   
Ostracizing me from the warmth of society  
But society has forsaken me, till dark   
Is my only friend, my one benefactor   
Protecting me, but defeated by sunlight   
Amongst shadowed rainbows and wingless dreams   
I continue to run, hoping not to battle   
The specters that fear the truth of midnight,   
Cutting like an austere silver sword   
And shielded, my eyes, behind false rainbow veils   
Showing me distorted perfection, as pain is destroying me   
So I skulk among corners, live among lies   
I know that I can never achieve; I have let my goals die   
And I'm left with dreams in the starlit black night   
But they, too, vanish as the silver moon fades.   
  
And though I weep when the star-clad night falls   
I treasure this truth from specter-fingers I pried   
This is my haven, my angel-filled sky   
And night is my one home, my true lullaby." 

Lexi felt satisfaction, a strange pride at translating her fears into words, something that had always been hard for her. Then she paused, remembering the dream last night when the darkness had terrified her but the light had been her friend. She frowned, perplexed- that wasn't like her at all, she realized, but she had liked the feeling of not having to hide from sunlight. But then she shrugged, putting the feeling off as dream-nonsense, irrelevant, and turned her attention back to the poem.

_ Ms. Portright won't understand it,_ she thought, feeling a strange fury course through her at the thought of her poem, stripped of its meaning a marked down with that hateful black pen. _No one will understand it. No one ever does._

But later, as she looked back in retrospect, she was wrong. Dead wrong.


End file.
